


Another Hope Entirely

by sophiagratia



Category: Scott & Bailey
Genre: Choking, Established Relationship, F/F, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 07:59:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1811104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'And when hope was returned to me<br/>it was another hope entirely.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Hope Entirely

**Author's Note:**

  * For [featherxquill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherxquill/gifts).



> **Content notice** : this is a story about sex as an act of trauma-recovery. It does not explicitly depict violence, but it refers obliquely to the events of the season-three finale, and depicts symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. It also contains light choking/asphyxiation as a consensual sex act. 
> 
> The title and summary are taken from Louise Glück’s poem ‘The Garment.’ 
> 
> Many thanks to [featherxquill](http://archiveofourown.org/users/featherxquill/pseuds/featherxquill) for a heroic beta and for providing me in the first place with most of this story’s important features.

She used to love a party, Gill did. 

It’s just the team, round at Janet’s, just these people she has worked with for years, a little Christmas do to keep them all from thinking too hard about how inhumane the way they spend their holidays is. She used to love a party, and she never understood why anyone didn’t, never used to suffer from that unease with people, never lacked for things to say, never struggled with the movement from conversation to conversation. And she never had to try too hard to play the boss. 

Now crowds make her nervous, and any more than two or three counts as a crowd. Now there’s this new effort, this new performance, always keeping her back to a wall and a sightline on all entrances and exits and trying all the while to look like that’s the last thing she’s doing. Coppers get weird that way, paranoid, sometimes, but Gill never had, never, yet now here she is in Janet’s lovely home with these people she loves in spite of herself, mechanically forcing herself to eat so she won’t fall over, and wondering if her smile looks like a grotesque painted doll’s. 

‘Oi! Boss!’

She gets a hand up in time to catch a projectile launched from a corner where Mitch and Rachel are just about pissing themselves laughing. An awkward oblong that looks like it was wrapped by a child, and really, the two of them, but she unwraps it—to find herself holding a toy figurine of Godzilla. Moving parts and all. She balls up the wrapping and chucks it at Mitch’s head.

‘Pull a cord and it’ll bollock you about not filing incident reports _in the timely manner becoming of a legitimate professional_!’ Rachel shouts, an outrageous impression but one she can’t help recognising, and then Rob’s voice stage-whispering, ‘But does it do press conferences?’ and Janet swats him: ‘Backwards in heels!’ and the room’s full of whoops and whistles.

‘Children!’ she shouts at them as they collapse on each other, but her smile’s coming easier. Burns her cheeks, in fact. She tucks the stupid thing under her arm, pretending it’s not because she can’t resist the urge to clutch it close, pretending she’s not gone teary about a stupid, stupid gag gift and the lot of morons who work for her.

‘Aww, they _leurve_ you!’ says Julie, at her elbow, where she’s been all night, casually staying close, holding her up with her presence.

‘Sod off,’ she says, and sniffs. 

‘Going a bit soft, are we, Murray? Getting to be a giant softy? Want your underlings to _like_ you, do you, are you being _nice_ to them? Disappointed, really, expected better of you.’ It’s just a routine, but she’ll never get tired of the way Julie sneers like that, and her eyes light up, and she looks Gill up and down like a challenge and an invitation all wrapped up together.

Gill brandishes the Godzilla toy. ‘Fire-breathing city-levelling supermonster not good enough for you? Rather pleased with myself, and if you’re not I don’t need you standing next to me.’ It’s comical, how bad a lie that is, and it’s only the smallest consolation to know that only Julie knows it. 

And Julie’s been doing this—standing next to her—long enough to hear the strain in her performance. But ‘All right, kaiju mine,’ is all she says, with a hand on her shoulder that could be casual, if it weren’t for everything else.

‘Do you think I am?’ Gill says after a moment, almost under her breath. ‘A monster. Godzilla. Do you think I really am?’ 

Julie smirks, casting a long glance around the room. ‘If you are, what does that make me?’

Six months ago, that would have been a joke. She would have laughed. She would have had a retort on her lips as ready as a kiss.

Now she just lays her hand over Julie’s, resting on her arm.

‘If you’re a monster, you’re a gorgeous one,’ Julie says, and it’s a wonder, how she keeps that lilt in her voice. ‘And,’ she adds after a moment, ‘far too small to do any damage you don’t intend to. Little mouse monster thing. Breathes fire, just enough to light a match. Stomps about, steals cheese.’ And Gill does laugh at that, not because it’s funny, it’s too stupid to be funny, but she laughs because it’s the same bloody joke Julie Dodson has been making since they were girls in uniform.

‘Sod off,’ she says again. She wipes her cheek and catches her breath. ‘Bloody shattered,’ she says, as if that accounts for how ridiculous she is, monstrous and too small and teary over nothing.

‘Home then, monster girl?’ It’s new enough, this assumption that they’ll be going home together, that it can still make Gill flush just a little.

‘Home, yeah.’ 

The long tour through the room, the extended, booze-soaked goodnights feel like too much to withstand, but there’s that flush to sustain her through it. When she finally makes it to the door, Rachel hugs her hard and says ‘Happy Christmas, boss’ in her extreme devoted way, and Janet kisses her cheek and gives her a look that says a lot more than that, and there’s a lot about them both that makes her feel like it won’t be such a long road back to herself, with women like that behind her. But she still looks too carefully around her when they get outside, and she checks the back seat before she climbs into Julie’s car, and Julie notices and pretends not to. 

‘Mine or yours then?’ Julie says, like there’s nothing more disturbing in their night. 

‘Mine. I need a shower.’ Julie knows what that means and Gill doesn’t want to leave it there, so she adds, ‘And I’m far too fond of what you look like in my bed.’ Julie gives her a comical growl for that, and she wonders how she got so lucky.

And Julie keeps her laughing the whole way back, with her fluent running commentary on the party, the conversations she missed, her pitch-perfect impersonations of the lads, her truly scary pissed-Rachel-Bailey. The same Julie Dodson, after all these years, after all this mess and horror.

When they get in, she schools herself not to run up the stairs. Julie deserves the kiss in the foyer, to be pulled up to the bedroom by a warmly-held hand, to be kissed and kissed again, at length, leaning on the bed. But she can’t sustain it for long, not with this panicked sense that if she doesn’t get out of her clothes she’ll, what, fall through the floor, disappear, dive out the window.

‘Won’t be a minute, slap, get yourself a drink if you like,’ she says, trying to sound casual, and darts for the bathroom.

She doesn’t like how fast, how hard, she slams the tap open or how she waits to breathe until she’s torn every last piece of clothing from her and got one foot in the shower, she doesn’t like that she’s still doing this, washing everything off her every chance she gets. And it’s a half-measure, as coping mechanisms go, but the illusion is a good one, the way hot water makes it easier to feel her way back into her own body, the way she can pretend that if she scrubs hard, all that horror will drain away, like so much dead skin, with the soap and the water. And it does help her to remember to breathe.

Calmer, cleaner, she stands in front of the mirror in her towel, watching her reflection, studying herself for—what? Like the spiderweb of cracks across the inside of her will show on her face, like if she looks closely she’ll see how close she is to shattering, like her skin will shatter and reveal the Godzilla thing she really is, the scaly careless thing that can do nothing but indiscriminately destroy.

She draws a sharp breath, braces herself against the vanity, cool, solid, real. ‘None of that now, y’wretched slag,’ she scolds herself under her breath, and she squares her shoulders, defying her reflection.

Behind her, in her bedroom, reflected in the mirror, there’s a sweeter sight. Julie’s lounging in the armchair by the window, framed by the lamplight from the street. Smoking out the window, in her finely-fitted waistcoat and the cufflinks that glitter at her wrists and the points of her deadly-looking heels, she looks like something out of a pulp novel or a cautionary tale. Gill watches her in the mirror a while just for the pleasure of it, a kind of pleasure that eases the tense involuntary tautness of her muscles, keeps her breathing easy. And when Julie catches her watching, the look she gives her goes straight to her cunt. 

Julie flicks her fag end out the window and stands and kicks her shoes off and crosses the room and the sight of that’s a pleasure, too, but then she’s close, then she’s right behind her, and then—the startle reflex, the flinch she can’t get rid of. Even when she sees it coming, still she startles. Even when it’s Julie and the broad familiar callused palm of Julie’s hand, even when it’s Julie’s lips on her shoulder, Julie’s arm snaking around her waist, Julie, safe as houses, still she startles. 

‘All right?’ Julie’s voice, safe as houses.

‘Yeah,’ she says, another reflex, but it’s less of a lie than it could be and that’s not nothing. Julie kisses her shoulder again and it’s almost possible to relax into it. She has one eye on the door, and part of her is wondering whether she threw the bolt when they came in, going over and over her memory of turning the key in the lock and doubting it, but most of her is here with Julie, with Julie’s lips on her shoulder and Julie’s arms around her, most of her. 

She smiles, and it’s not hard, not really. ‘Yeah,’ she says again, and it’s easier the second time. ‘Look at you,’ she says, and the smile comes easier still. ‘So smart, you dapper thing, I’ve been torn all night between wanting to stare at you in that forever and wanting to just tear it all right off you.’

‘Made your choice yet?’ Julie’s smug smirk is such a wonder, and it feels so good against her skin.

‘Stay as you are, I think, I think I’m not done staring.’ She twists in Julie’s arms for a kiss that tastes of smoke and whiskey and she’s not quite steady on her feet yet but this is such a far cry from the nerve-shattering hyperaware catastrophe of the party that, ‘Yeah, you know what, yeah,’ she says, and with a flick of her wrist she drops her towel. 

Julie’s smirk becomes a grin at that, and the grin is teeth grazing her shoulder, too. Gill pulls her close, and the fine Italian wool of her trousers brushes up just perfectly against her arse. ‘Right choice,’ she says, as Julie’s hands slide down along her ribcage, across her belly, settle on her hips to hold her close. So familiar, and that’s good because she’s so exposed, naked like this when Julie isn’t, skin against wool—but there’s the thrill in that, too, that textile graze that lights her up just enough to fill her with want. 

She tilts her head back for another kiss, and puts some bite into it this time. ‘Never mind staring, gorgeous as you are, I want you too close to look at.’ So close it makes her nervous all over again, so close she has trouble keeping her nerves out of her voice. 

‘Me, I don’t mind looking,’ Julie says, half a purr, so close to her ear. She does look, piercingly, slowly, and Gill watches her in the mirror, taking the whole of her in, taking her time about it. ‘But if you ask nicely, I suppose I could be compelled to take you to bed, long as we leave the lights on.’ Julie’s hands are cool and dry, sweeping across her belly to cup her breasts, and Julie’s lips are sweet as anything, and she wants to keep and hold this, no matter the trembling little core of fear at the centre of her.

‘Why not right here?’ she says, and her voice does crack a little, this time. Let it be desire, rather than this fear, that Julie hears. 

But Julie knows better than that. ‘You sure?’ she says carefully. ‘Like this?’ She drops her hands to the safer zone around Gill’s waist, and backs away a little, just a fraction of an inch, just to let Gill know she’s got an easy way out if she wants it. 

‘God, yes,’ she says, pulling Julie close again, tight against her back, and however fragile it feels she also means it, urgently. ‘Just like this.’ 

If Julie hesitates, she’s right: it’s been months of never having her back to anything, of flying off the handle every time someone touches her from behind – even Julie, even Julie’s familiar hands and lips. Months of looking over her shoulder and never sitting still. But she’s worked for this, this feeling she has now that it might be possible to stay here, just like this, with Julie pressed close against her back, Julie’s arms around her from behind. She’s worked for this, she deserves this. She takes Julie’s hand to kiss her palm. ‘I swear to god, slap, the only thing I want in the world right now is for you to fuck me, just like this.’ 

Julie may hesitate, but Julie also trusts her—Gill knows she does, she can hear it in the way she sighs, feel it in the way she holds her, the kind of secure hold you need training to master and training to break. ‘Just like this, then,’ Julie says, a smoky-voiced desiring assent that makes Gill go a little weak at the knees. Julie winds her hair in one hand and lifts it to kiss the back of her neck, slowly, up and down. ‘Just like this,’ she says again, a whisper firm as a promise, and Gill starts to feel that much less like the shatter-prone thing she saw in the mirror.

And the way Julie touches her, so familiar, makes her weaker still. Julie’s hands across her skin, the one that moves to cup her cunt and the one that holds her steady, palm across her sternum, so familiar, these hands that know her down to her bones, know where and when and how to caress, to press, to tease and push. There’s a special pleasure, too, in watching their reflection, watching the flush that rises across her own skin and the matching one in Julie’s cheeks. And if she keeps one eye on the door, well, it’s easier this way.

And Julie’s hand slides round behind her, one finger tracing the curve of her arse, and lower, and gently urges her to part her thighs. The broader stance gives her more purchase on the ground, and Julie’s fingers sliding across the slickness of her skin give her a kind of purchase, too. 

‘God, yes,’ she whispers, leaning back, giving Julie more of her to hold, covering Julie’s hand on her chest with her own, lacing their fingers together, squeezing hard. Julie takes her time, with slow kisses on her shoulders, at the base of her neck, her fingers moving slowly, back and forth, circling slowly, building her up, these familiar gestures that make her sigh and squirm, and then slowly, slowly, pressing two fingers deep inside, and Gill permits herself a little cry at that, and the way she’d sink through the floor if Julie weren’t holding her up is a delicious thing.

And if it’s the first time in a long time she’s let herself do this, be taken from behind like this, this too is still familiar, if sort of turned round—the way she fits in Julie’s hand, two fingers deep inside and her thumb along the crease of her arse, her other fingers splayed, coming up against her clit, clumsy and exhilarating. 

It’s like being held, the way Julie fucks her, with her whole hand, like that. Like being held, or held together. 

Julie’s fingers push and curl, Julie’s thumb presses hard against her arse, Julie nips and licks and sucks at her shoulders, her shoulderblades, and carefully, upward, presses kisses against her neck. She watches their reflection, daring herself to be so exposed, to Julie’s hands, Julie’s mouth, to her own eyes. She watches, presses back against her, arches into the kiss, exaggerates her own exposure, just to prove she can. Julie holds her tight, palm flat against her sternum, and Gill arches back against her, bares her throat, to prove she can.

There was a bruise there, and when she sees herself in the mirror, there still is. She wonders if Julie sees it too. 

The thought’s a horror, with no place in this sweet scene. It strikes her, suddenly, to take Julie’s hand and cover her own throat with it, cover the bruise that is and isn’t there, and she does it before she can think twice, takes Julie’s hand and covers her own throat with it, and lays her hand over Julie’s, to show her what she means. 

In the mirror, Julie’s eyes widen. They haven’t done this before. 

‘Don’t press,’ Gill says, faster than she means to. ‘Just hold. Like this. Okay?’ She takes a breath, feeling it newly, strangely, against Julie’s hand. ‘I mean, is it? Okay?’ They haven’t done _this_ before, either, make up rules on the fly like this, but maybe they can, now, maybe they’ve made all the important ones already, maybe they know, now, how to do this. It occurs to her too late to be frightened that she’s done something wrong, that Julie will be appalled, that, she doesn’t know what, that she’s confessed something awful, something she shouldn’t even feel, let alone share or ask for. 

But Julie’s fingers close around her throat, gently, firmly, fitted close like a collar, and Julie takes a deep breath and says, ‘Yeah, okay,’ on the exhale. She doesn’t press, she just holds, perfectly fitted, like a collar, or not like anything, just like Julie’s hand holding her, perfectly, by the throat. Julie’s forearm across her sternum, the heel of Julie’s hand nestled into her clavicle, the pressure of Julie’s palm and Julie’s fingers. She can feel her own pulse against Julie’s hand; it’s getting faster, and Julie swallows hard. 

‘All right?’ Julie says, just a touch of tremor in her voice—fear, desire, both, some third, unnameable thing. Gill feels it too.

‘Yeah,’ she says, a little breathlessly, a little dizzy. She sinks a little, in Julie’s arms. Is this what it feels like, to trust someone absolutely? ‘Yeah.’

‘All right,’ Julie says, and it’s a statement this time, tremorless and reassuring, holding Gill in her voice every bit as much as she’s holding her in her hands. And Julie kisses her temple, and Julie’s fingers begin to move again, inside, slowly, and Gill feels suspended there between her hands, the one round her throat and the one on, in her cunt. ‘How’s that, then?’ Julie says, whisper-firm, into her ear.

There’s no answer to that, not in words, not at first, no answer but pressing her hips back into Julie’s, whimpering, first at the feel of this and then at the surprise of what her voice feels like against Julie’s palm. ‘Good,’ she manages eventually. ‘Yes, good. Just keep. Like that, yes. ... _Julie_.’ And that’s the end of words.

Julie murmurs quietly in her ear, nonsense, reassuring things, _I’ve got you, love_ , and _that’s it_ , and _all right, love, all right_ , and all the while holds her, fucks her, deep and slow. Then, following the rhythm of Gill’s breathing, faster, pressing her between the vanity and her hips, and in Julie’s murmuring voice just the hint of a growl, and kisses more urgent at her ear, her temple, a nip at the corner of her jaw, and it overwhelms her, and she doesn’t know what sort of sounds she’s making, whimpers, pathetic little whining, pleading sounds. Julie’s fingers, Julie’s voice, Julie’s hips, Julie’s lips and teeth, gradually faster, gradually more insistent, but Julie’s hold on her throat never changes, never tightens and never slacks. Perfect and steady, Julie holds her. There’s that horror just behind it all the while, but Julie holds her, perfect and steady, keeps her here, all of her, overwhelmed and whimpering and breathless. 

And she wants more, wants to test this, see how far she can take it, and it’s reckless but she presses down on Julie’s hand, just a little, just enough to change the way her breath comes in, the pressure on her pulse, not enough to hurt or harm, just enough to—just enough—‘Julie, Julie, _Julie_ ,’ she whines, begging for something she can’t name. 

‘I’ve got you, love, I’ve got you,’ Julie says, holding her so carefully, so completely, and she sinks into a place she’s never seen before, beyond words, beyond thinking, beyond everything but Julie’s hands, Julie’s voice, Julie holding her, holding her together, deep into a kind of total darkness where the whole of her is held in Julie’s voice and Julie’s hands. And when at last she comes, it’s bright, and loud, and long. 

She’s slow in surfacing, slow in finding her way back to the sensible world of the vanity and the mirror and the strange fact of her feet planted firmly on the cold tiled floor. She finds she’s breathing hard, and trembling, and cold, and Julie is still holding her, one arm around her waist and the other firm across her chest, hand on her shoulder, Julie, holding her.

‘There you are, love, it’s all right,’ Julie’s voice, pulling her back. ‘It’s all right,’ soft and calm. She sags in Julie’s arms and it takes all her strength to turn and wrap her arms around her neck and kiss her, deep and slow and warm. 

‘Thank you,’ she whispers with what’s left of her. Julie brushes back the hair that’s stuck to her sweat-damp cheek, and Julie presses her lips to her forehead and holds her for the long while it takes to catch her breath.

‘Come on then, gorgeous monster girl,’ Julie says at length, and all but carries her to bed. 

She shivers in the clean, cold sheets, listening to Julie turning off the lights, undressing, fumbling in the dark, she shivers and she fears for one sharp awful moment that she’ll be overtaken by that horror, that she’s appalling, that none of this has happened the way she thinks it has—but then Julie’s climbing into bed behind her, naked, warm, familiar. Skin against skin, wrapped round her close and warm, and she doesn’t flinch or notice that she doesn’t. Close and warm, and after a time she stops shivering. 

She pulls Julie’s arm around her like a blanket, presses her hand to her lips, and she closes her eyes and sleeps, with Julie wrapped around her, safe as houses.


End file.
